1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the control of a mobile terminal. More particularly, the present invention relates to a user interface method and apparatus for a mobile terminal having a touchscreen.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent tendency toward functional convergence, mobile terminals are becoming versatile multimedia devices including various integrated supplementary functions such as an electronic dictionary, games, scheduler functions and the like. As the capability and functions of the mobile terminal is diversified, a convenient user interface is becoming an influential factor for improving the utilization of the mobile terminal. For this reason, various user interface mechanisms have been developed and proposed for facilitating manipulation of the mobile terminal. One promising user interface mechanism is a touchscreen.
A touchscreen is a display device that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area, whereby a user can execute a command or place a cursor by contacting a specific position on the display area with a finger or a device such as a stylus. There are three types of touchscreen mechanisms that are distinguished by the manner in which they recognize a touch: Resistive, Capacitive, and Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW). A resistive touchscreen mechanism senses a touch on the screen by detecting a change in resistance at a position between two spaced layers of the touchscreen panel, caused by a touch event. A capacitive touchscreen mechanism senses a touch on the screen by detecting a position at which the electric charge on a capacitive layer decreases. Finally, the SAW touchscreen mechanism senses a touch on the screen by detecting a position at which ultrasonic waves, such as infrared waves, passing over the panel are absorbed.
However, most of the conventional touchscreen-based user interface technologies have been developed for use with relatively large interactive display panels and it is difficult to adopt the conventional touchscreen user interfaces to a mobile terminal because of its limited display size. Accordingly, there is a need to develop a touchscreen-based user interface method and apparatus that is capable of facilitating interaction with a mobile terminal having a smaller display size.